Eighteen months into the Syrian slaughter, 44 finally
happened on a barbarism he would not countenance. Fighter jets
and helicopter gunships had been pounding the city of Aleppo,
and the dictator had made it clear that the cruelty meted out to
Homs could be Aleppo’s fate, as well. Massacres had become the
rule of the day, more than two dozen torture centers had turned
Syria into a hellish land, and now finally a red line had been
drawn. Assad “hasn’t gotten the message,” 44 says. But the
truth is that the Syrian ruler some months back concluded that
he could kill with abandon, and that powers beyond wouldn’t come
to the rescue of the Syrian people.

The cruel fate of Daraya, a working-class Sunni town a few
miles southwest of Damascus, tells of a Syrian regime free of
any scruples or worries about the outside world. Over the past
week, hundreds perished in Daraya, women and children killed
execution-style. The Local Coordination Committees, a
reliable group that has been monitoring and documenting the
protests, put the death toll in that town at 630, a mini-
Srebrenica in many ways.

It was one thing to run out the clock on the Syrians, but
that didn’t suffice. The sophistry and the cynicism that covered
up the abdication assumed that all, at home and abroad, were
incapable of seeing through the pretense. Thus, help was always
on the way, just another round of deliberations at the United
Nations Security Council away.

We exhausted and stretched the language of outrage -- our
diplomacy ran out of adjectives, as Senator John McCain so aptly
put it. Our cavalry would turn up if only the Syrian opposition
would overcome its differences. Then there was the specter of
the jihadists: They were converging on Syria, and surely,
Secretary of State HRC said, we wouldn’t want to be
on the side of Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda. The best is the enemy of the good: There was no way of
determining in advance what kind of regime would emerge in the
aftermath of Assad, hence we should be forgiven our caution.
What might look like moral callousness in Houla and Aleppo
should then be considered strategic wisdom.

The ways of the world are what they are: The custodians of
American policy had placed their wager on the attention span of
spectators to the Syrian slaughter. Crimes, however monumental,
become routine. Wait out the initial outrage and people move on,
they weary of calamities. Besides, the policy of the Obama
administration had skillfully depicted the choice in Syria
between boots on the ground or total indifference. Now it could
be argued that this is a false choice, that there is a great
deal that could be done short of dispatching the Marines to the
shores of Latakia.

From the very beginning of this war between the Syrian
ruler and the vast majority of his people, it was well
understood that Turkish policy deferred to America’s
preferences, so close is the relationship between 44 and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey could have
tipped the scales with a no-fly, no-drive zone on the Syria-
Turkey border. A buffer zone would have given would-be defectors
from the Syrian army protection and encouragement. Sunni
recruits have been eager to desert the Alawite regime, shamed
and violated by the cruelties inflicted on ordinary civilians.

One mantra of 44's administration has been that Syria
isn’t Libya, that the former has more difficult and sensitive
borders. But these borders call for a more assertive American
policy. The feuds of Syria were bound to spill into neighboring
lands. Lebanon is, of course, the most sensitive of these
neighbors to the Syrian contagion. That delicately balanced
country is on the verge of a relapse into its old, deadly ways.
Loyalists of Assad battle his opponents, while kidnappers and
masked men roam free in Beirut. It is a veritable hell in the
northern city of Tripoli, where a conservative Sunni majority is
at war with an Alawite enclave.

There are tremors of Syria making their way into Iraq, as
well, playing on the fault lines between the Sunni sympathizers
of the Syrian rebellion and its Shiite opponents.

A swifter outcome to this fight for Syria would have been
both a strategic and a moral imperative. Great Satan didn’t have to
carry the burden alone. Turkey and the Sunni Arab states would
have been assured that She. was in this fight, as well.

44 has only now chosen to speak out on Syria and to draw a
line that the Dr General President For Life in Basharopolis never intended to cross.

wHoA!

h0t!

~hEy Y"all! DoN"t MiSs GsGf~!

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